For Part 1- click here
In Dissemi-Nation, Homo Baba writes
The nation is no longer the sign of modernity
Nations pre-existed Empires, some survived them.
under which cultural differences are homogenized in the 'horizontal' view of society.
Dubai is plenty modern. It is not culturally homogeneous. But then neither is London or New York or any great city.
The nation reveals, in its ambivalent and vacillating representation, the ethnography of its own historicity
Everything reveals its own history.
and opens up the possibility of other narratives of the people and their difference.
Anybody can tell a story about anything- including a a world where teenagers get bitten by radio-active spiders.
The people turn pagan
Why bother? Most people already are plenty pagan.
in that disseminatory act of social narrative
which involves telling boring and stupid lies
that Lyotard
pronounced retard
defines against the Platonic tradition, as the privileged pole of the narrated, 'where the one doing the speaking speaks from the place of the referent. As narrator she is narrated as well.
Also, when she eats a sandwich, the sandwich eats her. Dude, you are blowing my mind!
'And in a way
A stupid and boring way
she is already told, and what she herself is telling will not undo that somewhere else she is told's'
Also, when she takes a dump, the dump is taking her!
This narrative inversion or circulation -- which is in the spirit of my splitting of the people -- makes untenable any supremacist, or nationalist claims to cultural mastery,
Tell that to Putin. He will apologize to Zelensky and withdraw his troops.
for the position of narrative control is neither monocular or monologic.
nor does it matter in the slightest. Any cretin can tell stories.
The subject is graspable only in the passage between telling/told, between 'here' and 'somewhere else', and in this double scene the very condition of cultural knowledge is the alienation of the subject.
If by 'cultural knowledge' you mean ignorant, stupid, shit- sure.
The significance of this narrative splitting of the subject of identification is borne out in Lévi- Strauss' description of the ethnographic act.
Which is telling stupid lies about remote people.
The ethnographic demands that the observer himself is a part of his observation and this requires that the field of knowledge -- the total social fact .-- must be appropriated from the outside like a thing, but like a thing which comprises within itself the subjective understanding of the indigenous.
Or you can just make shit up.
The transposition of this process into the language of the outsider's grasp -- this entry into the area of the symbolic of representation/signification -- then makes the social fact 'three dimensional'.
Four dimensional- it is a world-line.
For ethnography demands that the subject has to split itself into object and subject in the process of identifying its field of knowledge;
Just as you have to split yourself into object and subject when you take a dump or brush your teeth or cross the road. Failure to do so would result in your shitting your pants or brushing the teeth of the postman or getting run over by a truck.
the ethnographic object is constituted 'by dint of the subject's capacity for indefinite self- objectification (without ever quite abolishing itself as subject) for projecting outside itself ever-diminishing fragments of itself'.
No. The ethnographic object is constituted by its actually existing some where far away. You can't get a grant to study the ethnography of the leprechauns of Kilburn.
Once the liminality of the nation-space is established, and its 'difference' is turned from the boundary 'outside' to its finitude 'within', the threat of cultural difference is no longer a problem of 'other' people.
Why did Homo Baba's people have to run away from Iran? There was a threat that 'cultural difference' would cause them to be killed or forcibly converted. Establishing the liminality of shit doesn't help any if 'other' people keep trying to fuck you up.
It becomes a question of the otherness of the people-as-one.
Only if the answer is some boring, stupid, shite about how when you take a dump, the dump takes you.
The national subject splits in the ethnographic perspective of culture's contemporaneity and provides both a theoretical position and a narrative authority for marginal voices or minority discourse.
Unless, as happened to Homo's people in Iran, they are killed or reduced to a pariah status.
They no longer need to address their strategies of opposition to a horizon of 'hegemony' that is envisaged as horizontal and homogeneous.
Zelensky need not bother fighting Putin's goons.
The great contribution of Foucault's last published work is to suggest that
he was crazier than a shit-house rat.
people emerge in the modern state as a perpetual movement of 'the marginal integration of individuals'.
But this is true of any sort of State.
'What are we to-day?' Foucault poses this most pertinent ethnographic question to the west itself to reveal the alterity of its political rationality.
Foucault thought we should all have gay sex in an S&M torture dungeon.
He suggests that the 'reason of state' in the modern nation must be derived from the heterogeneous and differentiated limits of its territory.
He was wrong. France's 'reason of state' had to do with being part of a kick-ass military coalition while boosting its economy through 'indicative planning' and the formation of a Customs Union with other European countries. This morphed into the EU.
The nation cannot be conceived in a state of equilibrium between several elements co-ordinated, and maintained by a 'good' law.
Sure it can. America seems to be doing fine with its system of constitutional checks and balances.
Each state is in permanent competition with other countries, other nations ... so that each state has nothing before it other than an indefinite future of struggles.
Nope. France proactively helped create a European Union such that it no longer need fear any hostile neighbour.
Politics has now to deal with an irreduci- ble multiplicity of states
The EU is about reducing that multiplicity for all practical purposes.
struggling and competing in a limited history ... the State is its own finality.
But, France is not taking its own State as 'final'. It aims to create a European Super State with its own Army and an Economy which it hopes will be the largest in the world.
What is politically significant is the effect of this finality of the state on the liminality of the representation of the people.
No. What is politically significant is the French people's ability to cause the Government to change its policies by rioting in the streets though, ultimately, it is the who they vote for which determines outcomes.
The people will no longer be contained
they have never been contained by stupid shit
in that national discourse of the teleology of progress; the anonymity of individuals; the spatial horizontality of community; the homogeneous time of social narratives; the historicist visibility of modernity, where 'the present of each level [of the social] coincides with the present of all the others, so that the present is an essen- tial section which makes the essence visible'.
Nonsense! The statistical picture of what is happening is always a little out of date. Moreover, future econometricians are likely to find that 'noise' was systematically confused with 'signal'.
The finitude of the nation emphasizes the impossibility of such an expressive totality
The thing isn't impossible. It just needs better tech and an improved Structural Causal Model.
with its alliance between an immanent, plenitudinous present and the eternal visibility of a past.
The past isn't 'eternally visible'. Nothing is.
The liminality of the people -- their double inscription as pedagogical objects and performative subjects
like dogs which have been taught a trick or two
-- demands a "time' of narrative
kids may demand a story at bed time. 'The liminality of the people' does not because it is too busy sodomizing 'the alterity of the Eschaton'. There are some videos on this subject on Pornhub.
that is disavowed in the discourse of historicism where narrative is only the agency of the event,
Events have no agency. People do.
or the medium of a naturalistic continuity of Community or Tradition.
That medium is the actual population inhabiting a particular place.
In describing the marginalistic integration of the individual in the social totality, Foucault provides a useful description of he rationality of the modern nation.
Useful to whom? Useless tossers like Homo. The guy teaches Literature for fuck's sake!
Its main characteristic, he writes, is neither the constitution of the state,
Nonsense! Constitutional law is a big feature of modern nation.
the coldest of cold monsters,
would have a temperature of absolute zero and thus would not be able to do anything very monstrous
nor the rise of bourgeois individualism.
Yet a 'bourgeois individual'- Elon Musk- thanks to his 'Starlink' saved Ukraine but also prevented it from attacking Russian shipping in a manner which might have started a Third World War.
I won't even say it is the constant effort to integrate individuals into the political totality. I think that the main characteristic of our political rationality
Homo & Co have no fucking rationality of any kind.
is the fact that this integration of the individuals in a community or in a totality results from a constant correlation between an increasing individualisation and the reinforcement of this totality.
Homo moved from India to England to America. Where is he 'integrated'?
From this point of view we can understand why modern political rationality is permitted by the antinomy between law and order.
There is no order without law and vice versa.
From Discipline and Punish we have learned that the most individuated are those subjects who are placed on the margins of the social,
So, if you suffer a brain injury and become an amnesiac, mentally retarded, beggar you have achieved greater 'individuation'. Cool.
so that the tension between law and order may produce the disciplinary or pastoral society.
There is no such tension. Discipline costs money. So does taking care of people. If the money runs out, the State can do neither.
Having placed the people on the limits of the nation's narrative, I now want to explore forms of cultural identity and political solidarity that emerge from the disjunctive temporalities of the national culture.
Is Homo going to talk about the sub-nationalism or religious chauvinism? No. The man is a fool
This is a lesson of history to be learnt from those peoples whose histories of marginality have been most profoundly enmeshed in the antinomies of law and order -- the colonized
being colonized has nothing to do with 'national culture'
and women.
Women exist in all countries. This is a class defined by biology. True some nations have a more misogynistic culture. French women got the vote some 14 years after Ceylonese women. The first female Head of Government was from Sri Lanka. France has never had any such thing.
Of margins and minorities The difficulty of writing the history of the people as the insurmountable agonlsm of the living, the incommensurable experiences of struggle and survival in the construction of a national culture, is nowhere better seen than in Frantz Fanon's essay 'On National Culture.'
His people were smart enough to remain under French rule.
I start with it because it is a warning against the intellectual appropriation of the culture of the people (whatever they may be) within a representationalist discourse that may be fixed and reified in the annals of History.
What is the point of warning against something that exists everywhere and which does no great harm? Homo isn't a Historian. Fanon was a Doctor who wrote Satrean shite because it was fashionable to do so at the time.
Fanon writes against that form of historicism that assumes that there is a moment when the differential temporalities of cultural histories coalesce in an immediately readable present.
Fanon failed. The EU now has its historians and they know, because they have access to the memoirs or interviews of all those involved, that there have been several such moments when 'differential temporalities' became 'immediately readable'. Brexit was one such moment. We thought it was impossible and then found out that we were wrong. It suddenly became obvious that EU Regional Policy had failed and thus the parts of the UK which had received the most from Brussels' largesse were most bitterly opposed to it.
For my purposes, he focuses on the time of cultural representation, instead of immediately historicizing the event.
Statistics matter. 'Representation' does not. Nobody cares if there is a Black Queen in Bridgerton. What is important is that the male characters look good with their shirts off.
He explores the space of the nation without immediately identify- ing it with the historical institution of the state.
Because he wasn't a historian or a social scientist. He was merely writing Satrean gibberish.
As my concern here is not with the history of nationalist movements, but only with certain traditions of writing that have attempted to construct narratives of the imaginary of the nation-people, I am indebted to Fanon for liberating a certain, uncertain time of the people.
Fanon died 60 years ago. Since then Economic History has taken off because Econometric techniques have improved and data sets have expanded exponentially in quantity and quality. We know much more about what happened to real wages in the Seventeenth century than Macaulay or Trevelyan.
The knowledge of the people depends on
Statistics and sampling and Econometric techniques.
the discovery, Fanon says, "of a much more fundamental substance which itself is continually being renewed', a structure of repetition that is not visible in the translucidity of the people's customs or the obvious objectivities which seem to characterize the people.
There is no such 'hypostasis'. All we have is 'Granger Causality'. Homo studied and taught stupid shit. He didn't notice that Granger had won a fucking Nobel Prize.
'Culture abhors simplification'
Culture does not give a fuck about it.
Fanon writes, as he tries to locate the people in a performative time: 'the fluctuating
movement that the people are just giving shape to'.
I suppose the cretin believed in the people rushing into the streets to kill the aristocrats.
The present of the people's history, then, is a practice that destroys the constant principles of the national culture that attempt to hark back to a 'true' national past, which is often represented in the reified forms of realism and stereotype.
India had plenty of 'subaltern' and 'people's' history. Sadly, they were written in the same style as Baba's shite and thus were utterly incomprehensible. What worked better was the film industry- e.g. the anti-Brahmin 'Dravidianist' scriptwriters and actors of Tamil Nadu- inventing a glorious past for a political purpose- viz. getting more Government jobs, seats in Medical Colleges etc. It must be said, Indira Gandhi did a smart thing when she helped Richard Attenborough make a film about the Independence movement.
Such pedagogical knowledges and continuist national narratives miss the 'zone of occult instability where the people dwell' (Fanon's phrase).
So what? Karunandihi's son is CM and his film-star son will become CM after him. The family has made billions of dollars.
In what follows I have substituted 'pseudo-academic bullshit' for 'the national culture'
It is from this instability of cultural signification that pseudo-academic bullshit comes to be articulated as a dialectic of various temporalities -- modern, colonial, postcolonial, 'native' -- that cannot be a knowledge that is stabilized in its enunciation: 'it is always contemporaneous with the act of recitation. It is the present act that on each of its occurrences marshalls in the ephemeral temporality inhabiting the space between the "I have heard'" and "you will hear-'.
By contrast, a national culture suffers no 'instability' of signification because the term means cultural stuff to be found in a particular culture. The thing is never 'contemporaneous' with its utterance. Why? It is embodied in texts published and disseminated after any act of utterance. All that matters is verisimilitude. If you write that Indian culture features Morris dancing, people reject your text.
I have heard this narrative movement of the post-colonial people, in their attempts to create a national culture.
India had plenty of national culture. The Brits actually contributed to it by insisting that ambitious Indians learn at least one vernacular and one classical language.
Its implicit critique of the fixed and stable forms of the nationalist narrative makes it imperative to question those western theories of the horizontal, homogeneous empty time of the nation's narrative.
There are no such western theories. We speak of 'Dark Ages' and 'the Age of Faith' and so on.
Does the language of culture's "occult instability'
Cultures are robust or 'anti-fragile'.
have a relevance outside the situation of anti-colonial struggle?
Anti-Colonial struggle is a struggle involving particular groups of people who hate each other as much as they hate the colonial power.
Does the incommensurable act of hying
lying? trying? Who knows? Who cares?
-- so often dismissed as ethical or empirical
how can you dismiss ethical or empirical considerations?
-- have its own ambivalent narrative, its own history of theory?
A shit one- sure.
Can it change the way we identify the symbolic structure of the western nation?
If you take LSD- why not? David Icke could give a very good 'history of history' featuring the occult activities of the Illuminati and Lizard People from Planet X.
A similar exploration of political time has a salutary feminist history in Women's Time. It has rarely been acknowledged that Kristeva's celebrated essay of that title
is meaningless gibberish. Apparently the lady was spying for the Bulgarian Secret Service.
has its conjunctural, cultural history, not simply in psychoanalysis and semiotics,
i.e. fraudulent or stupid shite
but in a powerful critique and redefinition of the nation as a space for the emergence
of feminist political and psychic identifications. The nation as a symbolic denominator is, according to Kristeva, a powerful repository of cultural knowledge that erases the rationalist and progressivist logics of the 'canonical' nation.
Bulgaria, under Communism, did feature a lot of very painful 'erasure'. I recall a dissident being killed on the streets of London by a Bulgarian agent who used a poisoned umbrella tip. No doubt, he was wearing a bowler hat and an Ascot so as to blend into the crowd.
This symbolic history of the national culture is inscribed in the strange temporality of the future perfect, the effects of which are not dissimilar to Fanon's occult instability. In such a historical time, the deeply repressed past initiates a strategy of repetition that disturbs the sociological totalities within which we recognize the modernity of the national
culture -- a little too forcibly for, or against, the reason of state, or the unreason of ideological misrecognition.
I suppose if you live under a Communist dictatorship, or have family in such a place who might be picked up and tortured by the Secret Police, you might babble paranoid nonsense about the Past having a strategy and Day after Tomorrow employing a Management Consultant while the Vanishing Present tactically shits on the boss's desk.
The borders of the nation are, Kristeva claims, constantly faced with
the possibility of invasion, illegal immigration or (for Communist shitholes) proletarians running the fuck away from the Worker's Paradise.
a double temporality: the process of identity constituted by historical sedimentation (the pedagogical); and the loss of identity in the signifying process of cultural identification (the performative).
Pedagogy is a performance. If you are as stupid as shit, you are doomed to becoming a pedagogue and have to perform stupid shit while the kids snigger at you.
The time and space of Kristeva's construction of the nation's finitude
Kristeva constructed shit. Time and Space are stuff Physicists understand. Nations have a beginning in Space-Time and will end sooner or later.
is analogous to my argument that it is from the liminality of the national culture that the figure of the people emerges
This simply isn't true. Leftists were babbling about the 'People' because they read about such a thing in some foreign manifesto. It had nothing to do with the 'national culture'. The Narodniks failed. The Bolsheviks prevailed. Ranajit Guha may have babbled about the Subaltern but he did it from Campuses three thousand miles away from revolting tribals.
in the narrative ambivalence of disjunctive times and meanings. The concurrent circulation of linear, cursive, and monumental time, in the same cultural space, constitutes a new historical temporality that Kristeva identifies with psychoanalytically informed, feminist strategies of political identification.
Those strategies failed. Any way, 'transgender' turned out to be a great wedge issue.
What is remarkable is her insistence that the gendered sign
which can be changed easily enough by a medical procedure
can hold such exorbitant historical times together.
But it can't. The thing is useless.
The political effects of Kristeva's multiple, and splitting, women's time leads to what she calls the 'demassification of difference'.
Difference is always individual. You can get a coalition of individuals to come together to push forward a mutually beneficial agenda. Second Wave Feminism did that. Kristeva's shite was useless. Still, she was important because she came from a Commie shithole and maybe she was saying- 'Women must not join the Communist Party because it treats us like shit. Get behind Gloria Steinem by all means.'
The cultural moment of Fanon's 'occult instability" signifies the people in a fluctuating movement which they are just giving shape to, so that postcolonial time
which one? There are many. There is a post-colonial Gandhian time, a Nehruvian time, a Marxist Leninist time, and then there is the time of doing business and guarding your frontiers using modern technology. That last prevails.
questions the teleological traditions of past and present, and the polarized historicist sensibility of the archaic and the modern. These are not simply attempts to invert the balance of power within an unchanged order of discourse.
But the 'order of discourse' of Homo & Co is shit.
Fanon and Kristeva seek to redefine the symbolic process
No. They simply weren't smart enough. Fanon was important because he was Black and sympathized with the Algerians who did become Independent. Kristeva had managed to get away from Bulgaria- a country whose name was once synonymous with a heretical sect believed to practice buggery.
through which the social imaginary -- nation, culture, or community -- become subjects of discourse, and objects of psychic identification, in attempting to shift, through these differential temporalities, the alignment of subject and object in the culture of community, they force us to rethink the relation between the time of meaning and the sign of history within those languages, political or literary, which designate the people 'as one'.
No they don't. At one time maybe people in France thought Black People said 'ooga booga' and tried to each other. Fanon was showing them this was not necessarily the case. Kristeva may have been babbling nonsense because her 'academic work' was just a cover. She was a Bulgarian assassin with a poisoned brolly.
They challenge us to think the question of community and communication without the moment of transcendence;
If there is no such moment, there can be no such question. This is the laborious conclusion these nutters themselves come to.
their excessive cultural temporalities are in contention but their difference cannot be negated or sublated. How do we understand such forms of social contradiction?
The same way we understand the Biblical injunction to go fuck ourselves.
Cultural identification is then poised on the brink of what Kristeva calls the "loss of identity' or Fanon describes as a profound cultural 'undecidability'.
Which is what happens when you lose your marbles or make a career out of writing meaningless shite.
The people as a form of address emerge from
Politics. A guy who wants power starts addressing crowds and calling them 'the People' who will prevail against the Tyrant who is currently occupying the office I want to move into.
the abyss of enunciation where the subject splits, the signifier "fades', the pedagogical and the performative are agonistically articulated.
Do Schizophrenics go about addressing 'the People'? Perhaps. But they may be talking to squirrels in the Park. Incidentally, most squirrels have Chinese accents. I wonder why that is?
The language of national collectivity and cohesiveness is now at stake.
Coz a nutter is talking to squirrels. That's why the neighbour's cat is keeping me under surveillance on orders from the CIA.
Neither can cultural homogeneity, or the nation's horizontal space be authoritatively represented within the familiar territory of the public sphere:
Nonsense! Cultural homogeneity can be represented by the advertisement we see on TV. A map authoritatively represents the 'nation's horizontal space'. Indeed, a contour map would also capture the vertical dimension.
social causality cannot be adequately understood as a deterministic or overdetermined effect of a 'statist' centre;
Talk of the bleeding obvious!
nor can the rationality of political choice be divided between the polar realms of the private and the public.
Yes it can. We can separate out what is in the interest of 'representative agents' and then figure out why they go against that interest for patriotic or other 'public-spirited' reasons.
The narrative of national cohesion can no longer be signified, in Anderson's words, as a 'sociological solidity' fixed in a 'succession of plurals" -- hospitals, prisons, remote
villages -- where the social space is clearly bounded by such repeated objects that represent a naturalistic, national horizon.
Anderson's narratives signified nothing. There are plenty of political scientists- or just guys with a bit of common sense who know their subject- who give us very useful narratives of this type.
Such a pluralism of the national sign, where difference returns as the same, is contested by the signifier's 'loss of identity' that inscribes the narrative of the people in the ambivalent, "double' writing of the performative and the pedagogical.
or the paranoid and the prostituted not to mention the 'I'm on my period, darling' and the 'just go have a wank, I'm trying to watch Coronation Street'.
The iterative temporality that marks the movement 'of meaning between the masterful image of the people and the movement of its sign interrupts the succession of plurals that produce the sociological solidity of the national narrative.
Yet, there are good enough 'People's Histories' of various Nations which describe how ordinary life changed over the centuries. Archaeology plays a big role in this. Baba's blather does not.
The nation's totality is confronted with, and crossed by, a supplementary movement of writing.
Or singing or wearing blue jeans or becoming a skinhead.
The heterogeneous structure of Derridean supplementarity in writing closely follows the agonistic, ambivalent movement between the pedagogicai and performative that informs the nation's narrative address.
No. Pedagogy is not a 'dangerous supplement' to performance. It is a performance- a poorly paid one.
A supplement, according to one meaning, 'cumulates and accumulates presence. It is thus that art, techne, image, representation, convention, etc. come as supplements to nature and are rich with this entire cumulating function' (pedagogical).'
That is not a meaning. It is incoherent shite. Writing is not a 'supplement'. It is a substitute for some purposes but not others. But the same is true of speech. 'Give it to me in writing' conveys this notion. Sometimes what is said is not enough.
The double entendre of the supplement suggests,
Derrida, like most French people, had a suppository up his bum
however, that 'It intervenes or insinuates itself in-the-place-of ....
Very true. You and your Mom are chatting on the phone. Suddenly a parchment intervenes or insinuates itself in the place of your dear old Mummy. Then some Chinese squirrels start accusing you of having robbed them of their nuts.
If it represents and makes an image it is by the anterior default of a presence ... the supplement is an adjunct, a subaltern instance .... As substitute, it is not simply added to the positivity of a presence, it produces no relief....
Try a bigger suppository coated in LSD
Somewhere, something can be filled up of itself.., only by allowing itself to be filled through sign and proxy'
or a really big LSD coated suppository
(performative). It is in this supplementary space of doubling -- not plurality -- where the image is presence and proxy, where the sign supplements and empties nature, that the exorbitant, disjunctive times of Fanon and Kristeva can be turned into the discourses of emergent cultural identities,
but has anything of this sort actually been done? No doubt there was 'Negritude' and Mobutu and Papa Doc and so forth but that had nothing to do with Fanon or Kristeva.
within a non- pluralistic politics of difference.
i.e. a non-politics politics which makes no fucking difference to anybody.
This supplementary space of cultural signification that opens up -
your arsehole to accommodate an LSE coated suppository
and holds together - the performative and the pedagogical, provides a narrative structure
of David Icke's sort. That guy has made a lot of money.
characteristic of modern political rationality: the marginal integration of individuals in a repetitious movement between the antinomies of law and order. It is from the liminal movement of the culture of the nation -- at once opened up and held together - that minority discourse emerges.
The Muslim League articulated a 'minority discourse'. There was nothing fucking 'liminal' about it.
Its strategy of intervention is similar to what parliamentary procedure recognizes as a supplementary question.
No it isn't. The Parliamentary rule severely restricts what would otherwise be the unlimited right of cross-examination familiar from the Law Courts. Many Legislators are also lawyers.
It is a question that is supplementary to what is put down on the order paper, but by being 'after' the original, or in 'addition to' it, gives it the advantage of introducing a sense of 'secondariness' or belatedness into the structure of the original.
Nonsense! The responder to the tabled question has discretion to change the nature of the supplementary question. He lays a trap for the questioner. He hopes the guy will say something which allows him to reply 'under the administration of your Party, things were much much worse as I will now show by quoting official statistics which I just made up.'
The supplementary strategy suggests that adding 'to' need not 'add up' but may disturb the calculation.
Nope. It gives the advantage to the responder because he gets the proverbial 'last word'.
As Gasché has succinctly
these nutters can't be succinct
suggested, 'supplements ... are pluses that compensate for a minus in the origin'.
Or they are stupid shit.
The supplementary strategy interrupts the successive seriality of the narrative of plurals and pluralism by radically changing their mode of articulation.
It has no such power. No doubt you can supplement your utterances by farting loudly, but you may end up sharting and thus soiling your pants.
In the metaphor of the national community as the 'many as one', the one is now both the tendency to totalize the social in a homogenous empty time,
Fuck off! Many 'national communities' are bound together by Faith in God's immanence. Time is not empty. God pervades it and God has a special love for his chosen people.
and the repetition of that minus in the origin,
the lack of something is not a 'minus'. Origin only occurs when some 'plus' or positive property comes into existence.
the less-than-one that intervenes with a metonymic, iterative temporality. One cultural effect of such a metonymic interrup-tion in the representation of the people, is apparent in Julia Kristeva's political writings.
Which were shit because the silly bint didn't know Econ or Geopolitics or anything else.
If we elide her concepts of women's time
of the month?
and female exile,
menstruating women are forced to sleep in the dog kennel- right?
then she seems to argue that the 'singularity' of woman -- her representation as fragmentation and drive --
Why not just say that Women be kray kray?
produces a dissidence, and a distanciation, within the symbolic bond itself which demystifies 'the community of language as a universal and unifying tool, one which totalises and equalises'.
Except it doesn't. How come people say 'History' instead of 'Her-story'? Also, why don't women have big dicks? Is it because Language is the occult alterity of the hypokeimenon of the 14 dimensional chora? I've always suspected it. I think Tintin in Tibet found irrefragable proof that this was the case but then Professor Calculus hit him on the head and sodomized him causing him to suffer amnesia and PTSD. What surprised me is that Snowy the Dog settled for sloppy seconds. Captain Haddock, I'd have understood- but Snowy?
The minority does not simply confront the pedagogical, or powerful master-discourse with a contradictory or negating referent.
It shoves an LSD coated suppository up its bum
It does not turn contradiction into a dialectical process. It interrogates its object by initially withholding its objective.
Or holding it up its rectum.
Insinuating itself into the terms of reference of the dominant discourse, the supplementary antagonizes the implicit power to generalize, to produce the sociological solidity.
Which is why it doesn't get invited to parties.
The questioning of the supplement is not a repetitive rhetoric of the 'end' of society but a meditation on the disposi- tion of space and time from which the narrative of the nation must begin.
But no modern (as opposed to religious or mythological) narrative of that sort begins with a story of how the Universe was created and the first Man and Woman were set down on Earth.
The power of supplementarity is not the negation of the preconstituted social contradictions of the past or present; its force lies -- as we shall see in the discussion of Handsworth Songs
which nobody in London now remembers. Channel 4 stopped producing stupid shit of that sort. Black peeps wouldn't watch it.
that follows -- in the renegotiation of those times, terms, and traditions through which we turn our uncertain, passing contemporaneity into the signs of history.
The plain fact is Black, Asian and other working class immigrant folks started voting Tory around that time. Now half the Cabinet is of that background.
Handsworth Songs, is a film made by the Black Audio Collective during the uprisings of 1985, in the Handsworth district of Birmingham, England.
'Uprising'! Hilarious.
Shot in the midst of the uprising, it is haunted by two moments: the arrival of the migrant population in the 1950s, and the emergence of a black British peoples in the diaspora.
Which diaspora? If Black people settle in a place, there will be Black people in that place.
And the film itself is part of the emergence of a black British cultural politics.
It had emerged twenty years previously. Farukh Dhondy, hilariously, was head of the British Black Panthers after Darcus Howe decided the thing was silly. Dhondy worked for Channel 4. Like Darcus Howe- who had a TV program at one time- he moved to the right. We thought both were boring old farts. It was Reagan's America we wanted to emulate.
Between the moments of arrival and emergence is the incommensurable movement of the present; the filmic time of a continual displacement of narrative; the time of
oppression and resistance; the time of the performance of the riots,
Where two Asians were burned to death in the Post Office that they ran. Asian peeps didn't like what was happening. But neither did Nigerian or Ghanaian origin people.
cut across by the pedagogical knowledges of state institutions, the racism of statistics and documents and newspapers, and then the perplexed hying of Handsworth songs, and memories that flash up in a moment of danger.
Handsworth experienced a lot of riots- most recently it was affected by the 'hoodie' riots. But young people have turned against that type of stupidity and criminality.
Two memories repeat incessantly to translate the living perplexity of history, into the time of migration: the arrival of the ship laden with immigrants from the ex-colonies,
The West Indies were still colonies- which is why their people had unrestricted right of entry, domicile, voting rights, citizenship etc.
just stepping off the boat, always just emerging -- as in the phantasmatic scenario of Freud's family romance -- into the land where the streets are paved with gold.
This is foolish. West Indians and Africans and Indians had fought bravely in both Wars. Everybody knew that the land they were coming to was cold, had horrible housing, and needed labourers to repair the damage caused by Hitler.
Another image is of the perplexity and power of an emergent peoples, caught in the shot of a dreadlocked rastaman cutting a swathe through a posse of policemen.
To be fair, the West Indians were unfairly targeted by the police. Birmingham had been Enoch Powell's stamping ground. There was a nasty side to Post-War Britain. What surprised me was that the cops would beat up even posh White kids who drove expensive cars. Oddly, they didn't assault Indian or Chinese origin young people driving BMWs. Maybe that was just in London where it was always possible that the kid's dad was a diplomat. What it came down to, in my opinion, was sexual competition. Asian kids weren't seen as likely to snake your boo.
It is a memory that flashes incessantly through the film: a dangerous repetition
in the present of the cinematic frame; the edge of human life that translates what will come next and what has gone before in the writing of History. Listen to the repetition of the time and space of the peoples that I have been trying to create:
Don't bother. Look up the guys who made this dreck on Google. They were all upper middle class and ended up with Knighthoods and sinecures at Ivy League or the Arts Establishment or what have you. Meanwhile, a lot of the Black and Asian kids growing up at that time in England were deciding that Thatcherism and Reaganism was the way forward. Fanon could go fuck himself.
In time we will demand the impossible in order to wrestle, from it that which is possible, In time the streets will claim me without apology, In time I will be right to say that there are no stories ... in the riots only the ghosts of other stories.
The streets didn't claim these toffee nosed poseurs. What the streets got was more fast food outlets and more Paddy Power betting shops. Homo Baba, the famous street-fighter from Handsworth, invaded Harvard and made it the seat of his operations. Aided by transgender lesbian goats from Nicaragua, he overthrew the Fascist rule of Donald Trump. He collectivized Agriculture and destroyed every Church, Mosque, Synagogue and Fire Temple in the United Soviets of America. Now he is planning to return to India to eradicate 'sanatan dharma' and put an end to Modi's reign. Will he install Rahul- who is one quarter Parsi- as the new Bolshevik Badhah of India that is Bharat? Only time will tell.
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